Take Your Pick: The New Frontier of Savings by DeAnne Smith

I knew the garbage-picking was spinning out of control when my girlfriend not only keenly spotted, but actually wanted to retrieve, a used plastic tube of lip balm stuck in the dusty grate behind our free refrigerator, itself garbage-picked. I mean, I'm as thrifty as the next underemployed, recently relocated gal but I draw the line at old fridge lip balm. How much could it possibly save? A dollar sixty? And what would be the counter-cost in herpes treatment?

I can't blame my girlfriend for her temporary loss of judgment. We've both been in a wide-eyed state of bliss since arriving to Montreal from Mexico, and not just because of the marijuana fumes wafting out of Parc La Fontaine. We're astounded by the amount of things people throw away. In Mexico, before throwing anything away, people either glue it, weld it, cobble it, smoke out of it, or try to sucker someone else into buying it. If you see a couch on the street in Mexico it's either fatally infested with crab lice and/or home to a family of four. If you see a couch on the street here, maybe it has a Merlot stain on the arm rest or it just didn't match the new Sony stereo. Welcome to northern North America!

Our scrounging started with a leisurely Tuesday night walk, when we happened upon a very inviting velvety red chair. We plunked ourselves down for a few minutes, half-expecting the owners to return, screaming, "Hey, you! That's our bike stand!" After about seven minutes on the chair, we still weren't experiencing biting sensations and a burning itch so we hauled it down Mont Royal and took it home. Lest you think it was a ratty piece of crap, I'll tell you that I saw a similarly funky chair for sale in The Village for $500, and that one had not been recently treated with the soothing scent of Ocean Mist Febreeze. The chair is now the focal point in our near-empty living room, tying the walls and the floor together quite nicely.

The next afternoon, we ran across a pile of lamps on the corner. No, I thought, they can't just be there for the taking. I figured, this is Montreal, maybe these people are participating in Put Your Lamps on the Street to Illuminate Against Nuclear Weapons Day. Well, we told ourselves, if they're still there in a little while, we'll take them. An hour later, there was one lonely lamp left. I tentatively crept over and picked it up, trying to effect a casual I'm-just-out-on-a-Sunday-walking-my-lamp stroll before quickly stuffing it in the trunk of our car.

By the time we found the black bookcase, any lingering garbage-picking shame had disappeared. "Hey!. Want this bookcase?" I yelled to my girlfriend across the street. "It only needs a few screws and a couple of shelves! Oh, and a back!" Perhaps I was emboldened by the fact that it was clearly a giveaway, surrounded by the distinctively slender boxes of recent Ikea purchases.

We ended up getting so skillful, we pre-picked garbage. The owner of an apartment we were looking at said he was going to dump the old fridge and stove unless we wanted them. It was in that fridge that my girlfriend scored the lip balm. Later, seeing that the fridge couldn't be easily Febreezed back into health, we decided to do as Montrealians do, and put it out on the sidewalk. And by the time I raced back upstairs to prevent my girlfriend from smearing the recovered balm on her lips, the fridge was gone.

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